hope springs eternal in the human breast?
written: 12:54 a.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2007

I must have woken up on the wrong side of bed. Whatever it was, once again I sauntered into Personal Property lecture all annoyed and half-asleep, half-asleep and therefore annoyed. I decided that I couldn't take another Emergencies class sitting in front of the Prof so I moved to the first row of the center block and I proceeded to spend the entire seminar playing Scrabulous on Facebook. If I hadn't read all three articles, I wouldn't have had a bloody idea what went on. But because I read all three articles, I wasn't really too bothered about listening. Because by now the arguments are familiar already, especially in the context of a non Western-styled liberal democracy. Should the rule of law be imposed as a fit-all formula for all states without taking into consideration their own legal ethos and culture? Is there really a one-size-fits-all solution? I think not.

Whenever there's familiarity you're lulled into a false sense of security, as if 1) you know the familiar arguments already; 2) you will always know the said familiar arguments; and 3) the said familiar arguments will always stay constant and no intervening factor would suddenly crash into the logical continuum and displace everything. As if black is black and white is white, and it is always at the peak of the comfort derived from such familiarity that you're most liable to fall.

It became 6 p.m. and I was still in school waiting to attend Evidence tutorial and I still felt like I'd just woken up.

I hate Mondays and not without a reason. My impeccably fucked up schedule for Mondays gives new meaning to the phrase "Monday Blues". Orgy covered Joy Division's "Blue Monday" and if I remember correctly, the lyrics of the Orgy version went, "How does it feel/To treat me like you do/When you lay your hands upon me/And told me who you are."

And I thought I was mistaken, and I thought I heard you speak. There's always that thing, isn't there? It's inescapable, showing up at the door to the seminar room in which you just had class, popping up on your Facebook newsfeed, occupying a seemingly-permanent spot at the back of your mind. You're not interested anymore in the issues and the application and the statement of facts and the rule proof and the conclusion; you're just interested in getting the fucking case out of the way and moving on to the next one. But the issues are complex, the factual matrix intricate; and so you find yourself mangled in the perpetual quagmire of the case at hand, staring at the same point all the time, reading the same ratio decidendi over and over and naively thinking, "Maybe I can change that. Maybe I can make it better."

I don't see how staring, being stuck, this inertia, helps to make anything better and therefore I conclude that you are a bloody moron.

D H Lawrence goes on to write in Kissing and Horrid Strife:

But still I know that life is for delight
and for bliss
as now when the tiny wavelets of the sea
tip the morning light on edge, and spill it with delight
to show how inexhaustible it is:

And life is for delight, and bliss
like now when the white sun kisses the sea
and plays with the wavelets like a panther playing with its cubs
cuffing them with soft paws,
and blows that are caresses,
kisses of the soft-balled paws, where the talons are. (inter alia)

I wonder how a person "defeated and dragged down by pain" is able to stand up on his own two feet and declare that "[he knows] that life is for delight/and for bliss."

I came across this poem while taking a break from Scrabulous during Emergencies and immediately fell in love with it. It made me feel better about, inter alia, having to go through another shitty Monday, about needing to prepare for Evidence tutorial, about my life, about the fact that it's the trial advocacy mock trial period and therefore about the fact that things were so much different roughly a year ago. Even things that I really have absolutely no locus standi whatsoever to feel bummed about made me all down, and I'm still rather down about it, and I really don't know why. I've ruled out the obvious and yet I still feel this way. But the poem made me feel better, even if it was only for a while. And it's really very well-written. I've never read anything by Lawrence outside of what we did for Practical Criticism in Jurong so that was a pleasant surprise.

(Side note about Evidence tutorial: It was a really boring topic called Competence, Compellability, and the Legal Professional Privilege. All the cases were boring. And I didn't even read the heading of the Legal Professional Privilege reading list because I am stupid enough to read full cases. That's owing to my inherent distrust for people whose name are not Yelen, including seniors whose mugger notes the entire world exalts and those people who write the head notes for all the cases. Logically speaking I should trust everyone BUT myself considering my grades in law school so far, for the substantive, eight-credit modules at least, have been utterly shitty; but still, I can't trust other people to do summaries and whatnot for me. That's why 1) I don't do study groups, but this is also because I don't want to drag other people down with my laziness; 2) I don't use mugger notes unless super bloody desperate, e.g. it's a day before the paper and I haven't read a single word for half the syllabus which happened to me for the Administrative Law component of last semester's Public Law paper; and 3) I don't read head notes unless the case is not in the reading list. That is exactly why I can never finish my work. I get bogged down in the stupid details, half of which I don't understand half the time, and I get supremely annoyed by how heavy-going reading for a bloody seminar/tutorial is and in the end I end up switching off before the work is even 50% done. Bleah.)

It's becoming more and more apparent that this general sense of ennui is going to intensify once the semester is over. Because at least now I have work to distract myself with and I have come to the conclusion that I really need to make up for the shit I pulled over my first two years in law school which is, to say the least, bloody embarrassing. And work is a good distraction even though I bitch and moan and complain like there's no tomorrow about it all the time, even though it irritates me and makes me so tired and sian, even though sometimes all I want is a nice, clean break from it. But despite all of that, work is the only thing that's preventing me from going into psychotic depressed emo mode right now. Honestly. Because as it gets closer and closer to December, entries like this one would probably increase in frequency.

There's always this fear that Year 4 is going to be screwed up, that it's going to be like Year 2 Semester 2, that I'm going to sell myself short for things that really, truly, heartbreakingly do not fucking matter. Whenever I think about Year 4 that is all I can think about, over and above the fact that Mag and Chloe will cease to be on exchange, that Tris and the whole gang will be back, that it will be the final year of law school and at the end of that awaits, firstly, grad trip, and secondly, the start of a sort of but not really (don't feel like explaining today) new life. I am terrified of what it is going to be like because I have absolutely no interest in revisiting those emotions and it is precisely because of this reason and this reason alone that I told Kenneth, "I'm not looking forward to Year 4."

And speaking of Kenneth, Year 4 also means he'd be away for possibly a year and that really sucks because I think I would miss him. Who's going to to tell me to "keep clam" during my driving test, or tell me stupid stories about having a bunch of minions doing his dirty work for him when he becomes partner of whatever law firm, or help me do my citations one day before I have to submit my essay? He even said that when he logged on to MSN on Sunday night, October 21, the day before my nemo dat paper was due, he knew that I'd ask him about citations. Well, at least he understands the concept of volenti non fit injuria.

Maybe I should stop running away from things; at the rate things are going, when Year 4 rolls around it really WILL be Year 2 Semester 2 all over again, but worse - as if it was even possible. But I think it's possible. There's another element, dimension, to the shit now, and it's that dimension that I keep wanting to face. But whenever I feel like I could face it, my instincts grab my hand and have me running for the opposite direction. And I suppose I can keep telling myself that I don't care, but the truth is, I think I do. No, wait - the truth is, I really, truly don't know anything at all.

Anyway, I just saw something interesting on Lavan's blog. Not that his blog is not always interesting; this is just, you know, particularly interesting and rather keeping with the theme of my crap emo rubbish entry.

He asked, "If you had feelings for someone, would you tell that person even when you knew that there was no possibility of a relationship developing?"

A response he quoted from one of his pollees (haha I just made up that word in the spirit of all the rubbish consignor/consignee, assignor/assignee, pledgor/pledgee rubbish in Personal Prop): "It is always better to be with someone who loves you more. You may not feel that way now but after your heart gets broken and you get hurt enough times, you’d realize that it is better to be with someone who loves you more. Trust me."

All it takes is one for that quote to ring completely true to me. Mom was right all along: Find a boy that loves you, whom you don't necessarily love, whom you could, to put it in the worst possible way, bully. Mom has told me this for a very long time and back then I used to believe that there is no meaning to be had in such an arrangement.

But now, I understand that it's really all about self-protection, and that it doesn't matter who you trample all over in the process. We fight for our own survival and I was deluded when I thought I could fight for somebody else, and more importantly, fight for somebody else who couldn't return the favour. It's never been a two-way street, it's never been about maintaining an equilibrium; it's always been about the balance tipping too heavily to one end and resulting in one party sliding off the scale completely. And I don't believe in that equilibrium anymore, and neither do I believe in love, and commitment, and the words that come out of a guy's mouth who's trying to get you into bed. I also do not believe that I am not beyond repair, but in the event that I am wrong, I believe that I am the only person who is capable of doing the fixing. I believe that the only person that I can truly always rely on is myself. And to a certain extent, a part of me believes that I don't need a guy then, now, later. Ever.

I haven't developed any real feelings for anyone since...well. And I've not responded to the sporadic instances of some vague attention shown to me. And I really don't care. And I don't understand how a person could reasonably expect me to seriously develop feelings for a person of the opposite sex when it feels like things happened only recently. The reverse is also true. I don't understand how I could go from that point in my life to the possible but improbable next point in my life - getting attached to someone else. Let's not go that far even - having feelings for someone else. Are you fucking kidding me? Utterly inconceivable. I don't see how it could be done. There is no conceptual space in which I could even begin to try to comprehend how that could be done. There is a disconnect between me and that suggestion on the most basic, fundamental level, and therefore it follows that the status quo as it stands is utterly inconceivable to me as well.

Kenneth thinks that I'm never going to get attached/married/whatever because I told him that I don't date my male friends and that I usually don't last with the guys whom I get to know just to get into a relationship with. The exception to the rule, of course, is the off-chance that I jump into something with a new guy and he turns out to be the right guy. But if we consider the fact that I no longer believe in "the right guy" or, even more broadly and idealistically, "the one", then that exception to the rule is really just...nothingness. There is no exception. It is void. It does not exist. The rule is what it is and Kenneth is right. (I won't make an exception to the no-dating-male-friends rule because that, as a concept, is also utterly inconceivable to me.)

Life isn't a fucking movie, and neither is it Microsoft Word. There is no backspace button, there is no happily ever after. There is just pain that defeats and drags you down, more horrid strife than kissing, no kissing at all.

But like I keep saying, it is what it is. So what? Who cares? I don't care.

On a completely unrelated note, I realised, very belatedly, that I really should have titled my Personal Property assignment "Nemo Dat Under Siege: The Hegemony of the Good Faith Purchaser?" instead. The one I submitted was without the question mark, which is wholly inaccurate because I eventually concluded that the exceptions have not been expanded such that nemo dat is completely or substantially ousted.

Next time I won't think of my title at 5 a.m. while taking a piss.

It's 2.15 a.m. and I haven't showered. Why do I waste my time writing such stupid and shitty entries about things that I shouldn't care about? Fuck. Really. FUCK.

before sunrise // before sunset

Previously:
- - Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2017
I'm moving. - Sunday, Jul. 11, 2010
In all honesty - Tuesday, Jul. 06, 2010
What I want for my birthday... - Sunday, Jul. 04, 2010
On Roger's behalf. - Friday, Jul. 02, 2010